Where should I start with Immanuel Wallerstein and Arghiri Emmanuel?

thank you, this checks out

It appears that Sakai’s answer is that land hunger was so severe that, yes, petty bourgeois individuals would be willing to endure it to have something like the standard of living they had been used to.

the sons and daughters of the middle class, with experience at agriculture and craft skills, were the ones who thought they had a practical chance in Amerika… What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land.

Here is a quote he takes from ““Social Origins of Some Early Americans”. In SMITH, ed., 17th Century America. N.Y., 1972.”

Land hunger was rife among all classes. Wealthy clothiers, drapers, and merchants who had done well and wished to set themselves up in land were avidly watching the market, ready to pay almost any price for what was offered. Even prosperous yeomen often could not get the land they desired for their younger sons…It is commonplace to say that land was the greatest inducement the New World had to offer; but it is difficult to overestimate its psychological importance to people in whose minds land had always been identified with security, success and the good things of life.

Thanks for your viewpoint and I think I’ll do that and keep working towards my first dev co-op etc. Nice to have the flexibility to transition down the line.

Thanks for your input. Web dev seems great and I’ve considered trying to deploy some kind of useful REST API, like for computing directions from one place to another on campus, probably with FastAPI in Python. Doing something with Docker is also on my todo-list…

I just started Forces of Production the other day. It’s interesting.

The other day I started reading a Chinese scifi novel 猫城记 Cat City/Cat Country. I thought about trying to translate it even though it’s above my reading level by just looking up all the words as I go. But I’m below that threshold of 95% understanding or whatever and have to look up many phrases on each page.

Behind the Urals is great. John Scott was a fellow traveller or party member in New York as I recall. Immigrated to the USSR to work in Magnitogorsk.

interesting thoughts

I’m asking because I wondered if dependence on colonial wealth could inform an argument that capitalism is historically contingent, that it was possible for there not to be capitalism

There is no doubt that the unpaid internship is exploitative, moreso than the already discouraging/tiring path to a first job programming. But I also think you were right to accept it as a step towards launching a career. It’s something you will never have to do a second time… onward and upward

I think a modern socialist planned economy fit for our situation would come out with a very pemanent, modular, and repairable cell phone. It would resemble an Apple product in no way, making use of open source hardware and software and with an ideological commitment against planned obsolescence.

May we live to see a revolutionary socialist restoration, but more than a restoration, a forging anew <3